On Friday at Texas Motor Speedway, Kyle Busch admitted to taking a glance at the Chase for the Sprint Cup standings with three races remaining in the season. He probably didn’t like what he saw.

Busch enters Texas fifth in the Chase at 36 points behind Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Matt Kenseth and Jimmie Johnson, who are currently tied atop the table. He dropped two spots in the standings after he finished 15th last weekend at Martinsville Speedway due to late-race handling woes.

The good news for Busch is that he won at Texas back in the spring. But the bad news is that another win on the 1.5-mile oval in tomorrow’s AAA Texas 500 may wind up not doing much for him if the guys he’s chasing – Kenseth, Johnson, third-place Jeff Gordon (-27 points) and fourth-place Kevin Harvick (-28 points) – turn in solid results, too.

“It’s certainly going to be a lot tougher now than what it had been and obviously, we’re going to have to have some luck on our side and the other guys aren’t going to be able to have luck on their side,” Busch said before qualifying fifth for Sunday’s race.

“If you have bad luck with the front two, then that’s going to bring five guys back into it, I feel like. It’s going to be an even tighter [championship] race. That’s what the fans want to see, probably [what] the media wants to see and what I want to see, but I bet you the front two don’t.”

Busch led a race-high 171 laps and took the lead for good off pit stops with 19 laps to go en route to claiming April’s NRA 500 at Texas. He’s hopeful that he can return to that form of dominance this weekend, as he attempts to erase his deficit to the leaders.

As far as the Chase is concerned, Busch believes that this year’s post-season has been better for him than those in seasons past. But as he noted, his wreck last month at Kansas and his late-race fade at Martinsville have put him in a big hole.

Now, from his standpoint, it’s win or bust.

“You don’t have that option here anymore in the Chase for as much as those guys up front are running well,” he said. “You can’t have any of those [bad races]. We’ve got to be on top of our game and come out here and the best we can do is lead all the laps and win all the races in these final three and see where the points stack up.

“If we do that and we still don’t win it, we did our job. If we don’t do that then, essentially, we didn’t do our job. We still got to be able to run the best that we can and try to make up ground and see where it all lies.”